Friday 22 March 2013 15.56 EDT
First published on Friday 22 March 2013 15.56 EDT

There is nothing very gripping about American breakfast TV, unless you fetishize traffic updates and perfect dental arrangements, but behind the scenes, it is currently providing one of the most gripping dramas in the industry.

The 60-year-old NBC morning show Today is having a year-long bad morning, which seems to only get worse with each attempt to fix it. In the latest turn of events, its ratings have hit the buffers taking a 15% year-on-year drop, while its arch rival ABC's Good Morning America extends a lead it first swiped 12 months ago.

The woes of the show cannot be laid solely at Lauer's door; Good Morning America has a brighter, perhaps shallower, but nevertheless more populist touch. The management and editorial structure of NBC have been in a certain amount of turmoil following Comcast's takeover of the company. Yet, just as primetime schedules rest on the ability of your commissioning executives, so the fortunes of the morning are draped around the shoulders of your anchors.

Lauer has gone from being a hero of 9/11 coverage, the faithful sofa companion of the incredibly popular Katie Couric, to the man on $25m who caused a middle-aged woman to lose her job and cry on television. The Lauer backlash has reached even august publications like the New Republic, which is telling us "Why Women Turned on Matt Lauer". To put Lauer's popularity rating decline in context (his "Q" rating is down from a 19 to a 9, in one year), TNR suggests he is now in the Taylor Swift league of people the US public feels uncomfortable with.

The Ann Curry moment, her sofa goodbye, was a uniquely awkward and horrible piece of television, which is a visual metaphor for the show: an on-air catastrophe, which onlookers are helpless to rectify, and Matt Lauer somehow manages to make worse despite his best intentions. It has become the pivotal moment not just for the show's recent ratings decline, but also for Lauer's own career.

Lauer putting his side of the debacle to Howard Kurtz – framing it as NBC incompetence rather than any animosity on his part – looks not so much like a successful fence-mending exercise, as a rather confused dog sadly and inadvisably returning to its own vomit, to try to determine what made it sick in the first place.

Lauer will take little comfort in the fact that he is not the first anchor to have had trouble with ratings at the show – or in the strong historical precedent for fixing the problem with the right co-host. In 1953, during the show's first year on air, its creator Pat Weaver, who is now somewhat better known as Sigourney's dad, found that his revolutionary concept in serving television for breakfast was not being as well-received by sponsors as he'd have hoped.

The calm, bespectacled host, Dave Garroway, was the embodiment of post war reassurance that American news wanted, but he had not quite delivered the numbers. In a turn of events that would not be out of place as a 30 Rock storyline, the answer arrived in the form of J Fred Muggs.

J Fred Muggs was a chimpanzee, who belonged to a couple of former NBC pages who had opened a pet shop in New Jersey. According to television writer Steve Battaglio's history of the Today show, the concept of enlivening Today with charismatic fauna had already been kicked around by executives when one spotted J Fred Muggs in the building and put him on the Today set. At a time when it was more acceptable to dress up animals as humans and repeatedly bite your co-stars, the ape was a hit.

It is not thought that the NBC production executives are scouring Bronx Zoo for a Lauer replacement, but the Today debacle has more than a touch of the circus about it.